81–90 of 155 posts
Garry - way to go!! Raising a fund of 100M+ while being so founder friendly is not easy. Of course building a stellar team helps. Nicely done! I read your farewell letter when you left YC - you hit the nail on head by saying you haven't decided what to do because that would obviate the "founder's perspective". Founders who are going to a known from a known will never know the unknowns faced by a startup. Everybody I'…
any interest/aversion to hardware or hardware/software?
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Two quick questions: Of the investments Initialized has made, what percentage of them are non-YC alums? Of those, how did they connect with Initialized? Cold email, warm intro, etc?
About 1 out of 3 startups from our last fund were not YC. Many came from warm intros, but a few I scouted and found myself. I went out and recruited Bannerman to YC personally (they're focused on security, which fulfills a key role on Maslow's hierarchy of needs), for instance, and then later invested afterwards. Cold inbound emails haven't worked well for me, but that's where software down the road should help.
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...and this is like a magnet.... how?
Might be something like adding an iron core to your magnet? Not sure, the analogy is sketchy at best.
It's like that. You start with bringing your cofounders together. Then you add your first customers. Then maybe you raise a little bit of friends and family money, and that lets you put more money into customer acquisition, which gets you more cofounders, which lets you get more revenue to hire a few more people, and raise more money, and so on.
So startups are like katamari damacy, and if you win, you end up picking up an entire industry.
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"So, spoiler alert, software. :-)" This got me thinking... I really do think that better tools for sourcing deal flow are a foundational component of the next age of entrepreneurship. Crowdfunding isn't working as precisely as some have hypothesized. I'd be really curious to see how companies like AngelList & Mattermark are parsing their data to determine correlative attributes of "fundable" companies. Any thoughts/i…
I have been building my own mini version of Mattermark as a curiosity project. I'm not even interested in deal flow as much as being able to predict rising startups. In terms of being a software engineer, I look at this is a career tool. I'm sure the bigger VCs and accelerators are building interesting things in this space but I haven't found much that's open source. As data points, AngelList and Crunchbase are good…
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I have been building my own mini version of Mattermark as a curiosity project. I'm not even interested in deal flow as much as being able to predict rising startups. In terms of being a software engineer, I look at this is a career tool. I'm sure the bigger VCs and accelerators are building interesting things in this space but I haven't found much that's open source. As data points, AngelList and Crunchbase are good…
VC tweets is also a great signal. Not perfect, but great. You can most tweeted startups every week here: https://chartups.com/topstartups/
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Might be something like adding an iron core to your magnet? Not sure, the analogy is sketchy at best.
One talk I like to give at college campuses is such: A startup is like the obscure 1990's Playstation game Katamari Damacy. You start off with a small magic ball about the size of a pencil eraser. You can pick up anything smaller than you, but if you try to pick up something too big, you bounce off and get smaller. You start picking up paperclips and chess pieces, and then by the end of the game (spoiler alert) you e…
Unrelated, but did you ever play Nobi Nobi Boy from the same creator?
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We're trying to figure out ways to get around this for later stage seed investments. We don't have a solution yet, but we're working on it. In a thread below I talk about file cabinet industries — industries that basically have no software, and are horribly inefficient. Investing is absolutely one of those, but only using email and calendaring. The main bottleneck for investors is number of hours in the day, because…
>We're trying to figure out ways to get around this for later stage seed investments. Does that mean that seed stage companies should not bother contacting you unless they can get a warm intro?
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About 1 out of 3 startups from our last fund were not YC. Many came from warm intros, but a few I scouted and found myself. I went out and recruited Bannerman to YC personally (they're focused on security, which fulfills a key role on Maslow's hierarchy of needs), for instance, and then later invested afterwards. Cold inbound emails haven't worked well for me, but that's where software down the road should help.
so a quick follow up: how many startups of the last round were not located in SF? Sometimes as a non US citizen it seems like the whole startup world is all centered in SF...
SF/SV is still the most concentrated place for startups, so when you want to grow fast it's still probably the most concentrated place for talent and capital. You can certainly start a company anywhere (and people are, and that's great!), but when you want to grow fast many people still move here, now increasingly at the Series A.